Transcript

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>> Uber faced with dozens of new investigations launched by governments from around the world on Wednesday, after the company revealed it had covered up a breach that exposed data on millions of customers and drivers. Reuters' cybersecurity editor Jim Finkle.>> For a company that's not profitable and has not really shown a clear path to profitability, this is a big deal because we're talking about fines that could total in the millions of dollars and be significantly higher than that in sort of a worst case scenario.

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It really depends on what comes out of these investigations.>> Uber said it fired its Chief Security Officer and a deputy for their role in the incident, and Finkle says the company's former CEO could also be under government scrutiny.>> One key question is, of course, did Travis Kalanick order this or not?

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And basically, what we're hearing from some sources close to Uber is that he knew about it, but he didn't know that it had to be disclosed. And I think that's gonna be one of the focuses of these investigations.>> On Tuesday, Uber said it paid hackers $100,000 a year ago to destroy stolen data, and after a string of scandals, Finkle says how the breach was handled could further alienate customers and drivers.

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>> You're dealing with cyber criminals, people who have stolen your data, and they're promising to delete it, but do you really know that it's been deleted? So we don't know what's happened with the data. Just imagine if you found out that your license number had been leaked by your employer, your employer knew about it and kept it from you for a year.

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That wouldn't feel very good and it'll be interesting see if this does anything, if this hurts morale at Uber.>> The hack could also hurt a deal that was in the works to allow Japan's SoftBank to buy billions of dollars worth of shares from existing Uber investors. SoftBank could potentially chose to offer a lower price for shares or back out of the deal altogether.